Robert Horton, Writing About Film

About This Site

The Crop Duster has two goals. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly; and public appearances and TV jobs. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN.

The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve.

Pages

I hope to write something about Jeff Shannon, a longtime friend and feisty, enthusiastic member of the Seattle film critic community who died last week at age 52, but am finding it hard to do. So that will have to be postponed for a few days. I would like to point you in the direction of an article that Jeff wrote in his recent position as a columnist for facingdisability.com; this is quite an amazing piece, funny and harrowing at the same time, and full of things that Jeff alluded to but that I hadn’t known about in quite such detail. It gives a good account of his writing voice. Read it here.

If you’re a Facebook person, you should look through the postings on Jeff’s page, including incredibly stirring pieces by his sister and brother. The banner picture on his page is the Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey – if that isn’t Jeff, I don’t know what is.